Took young grandson to see James Cameron's "Avatar" in 3D today, through the blinding snow. Was expecting to be bored, except perhaps by the special effects, but was totally gripped all the way through. The special effects were indeed staggering, probing a whole new level of virtual realism, but the story line surprised by not being so crypto-fascist as most American sci-fi blockbusters have been (StarWars, Dune, Starship Troopers, Armageddon, Independence Day etc. etc). Sure it's simplistic, melodramatic, romantic - just as popular story telling has to be. The surprise is that it over-simplifies in an anti-corporate, anti-imperialist direction for a change.
The US Right is furious - this is a product of Murdoch's Fox don't forget - with lots of websites telling people not to go and see it (some chance). One of the milder comments is "Cameron needs to stop making anti American films. The United States invades foreign countries when necessary" [from www.topix.com]. But what's quite amusing is to watch leftish British commentators desperately trying to think of reasons to hate the movie anyway:
"Avatar is overlong, dramatically two-dimensional, smug and simplistic" - Philip French, Observer
"Even more tedious than the film's plot is the ideology enshrining it. In punctilious compliance with liberal pieties" - David Cox, Guardian
Several critics sought to belittle the film by comparing it to "A Man Called Horse" and "Dances With Wolves", but it owes at least as much (which is not very much) to "Seven Samurai" and "Viva Zapata". Avatar is indeed smug and simplistic, but then propaganda always was and always will be. Of course the British Left has entirely forgotten how to do propaganda, being so far up itself with political correctness and post-modern pseudo-radicalism. Avatar might indoctrinate a whole generation of under-16s that American militarism is the problem, which is certainly simplistic. But ever since Star Wars, blockbuster movies have been indoctrinating them that American militarism is the solution, and I know which I prefer...
Saturday 13 February 2010
Don't be a Tourist
A most obstinate fact that faces any would-be critic of modern Western society is that social changes over the last half-century that constitute the so-called "consumer society" have been accompanied by a considerable levelling of social (and to lesser extent economic) barriers between classes. We live in a more demotic culture than ever before: MPs and television presenters sport regional accents; air travel is no longer the preserve of the upper classes; a wide swathe of social classes aspire to consume luxury goods and services once the preserve of an elite (fuelled until recently by cheap credit). Deference toward social hierarchies and institutions has been vastly reduced. This is a real effect, not mere smokescreen, even if it hasn't so far been accompanied by equivalent reform to democratic institutions.
There's been a corresponding increase in snobberies of various sorts whose purpose is to maintain signs of social superiority in the face of this levelling down. Perhaps the most obvious one concerns food - contrasting those wretches who shovel down "junk food" with one's own consumption of scarce and organically-grown products. Wine snobbery (both against beer consumers, and in terms of superior wine knowledge) is another. Air travel has its own snobbery, that unseemly craving for an "upgrade", the disparaging jokes about "turning right" at the doorway. But one that really fascinates me, as a keen photographer, is that surrounding cameras.
It's considered naff in many photographic circles to use point-and-shoot digital cameras because the great unwashed use them, because they work so well and so easily that they de-skill an arcane art, and because of the unattractive stance they provoke - holding the camera away from the body and gawking at the LCD rather than peering intently through a viewfinder like a pro. The alternative is the single-lens reflex DSLR used by almost all professionals, which thereby aquires a certain cachet. These are large, heavy, expensive and complicated, but those very properties begin to undermine them as status symbols: learning to use one demands time and patience, a nerdish enthusiasm that's very unwelcome in cool circles. This poses a dilemma, but one which Olympus has now brilliantly attacked with its TV and cinema ad campaign for the new digital E-P1 Pen model.
This camera is almost as small as a point-and-shoot compact but has interchangeable lenses like a DSLR. It's easy to use and to carry but most important it has a cool retro look redolent of San Tropez in the '60s. Kevin Spacey is the chosen presenter, and the slogan is.... "Don't be a tourist!"
This slogan plays off yet another of the new snobberies, that about travel. So many people can afford to visit so many places around the world that it's essential to distinguish oneself from them: they are tourists, I'm a traveller, out to broaden my mind. Olympus's agency cleverly piggy-backs on this snobbery to sell a camera that's otherwise rather unremarkable. Carrying one will soon be compulsory on the smart beaches, replacing the pastel-coloured Canon Ixus on a neck-string...
Spectacular Christmas
If any more proof were needed that Guy Debord died in vain, all the faked fuss about which mediocre pop record would be the No 1 hit this Christmas provides it. In the same week that the Copenhagen talks ended in failure, journalists who claim to represent the opinion of the nation's youth are seriously claiming the victory of Rage Against the Machine as some sort of act of resistance: the purchase of one record owned by Sony has triumphed over another record owned by Sony, and in the real world nothing has been changed (not even Sony's balance sheet). I don't think this is what Gramsci meant by cultural hegemony, but it is very much what Debord meant by spectacle. If you want a symbolic Christmas act that has real purchase on reality, how about roasting the X-Factor judges with apples in their mouths?
Not so Relaxed?
Alistair Darling's bonus supertax appears to be upsetting people in the City of London. Tim Linacre of brokers Panmure Gordon said "This piece of legislation was cobbled together over a weekend. It is politically inspired and economically illiterate. It is vague, unclear and nobody knows what it means." On the contrary, I know what it means, and so I believe do a lot of other people. It means that a Labour chancellor, standing at the steps to the scaffold for his government, has briefly re-acquired sufficient balls to hurt the people who've been looting the public purse for private enrichment for so long. Vince Cable has called the tax "an embarassment". There's truth in both these critical comments: the tax is politically inspired (hoorah), and it is too an embarassment, if that means the opposite of "intense relaxation"...
In Memoriam: Nina Fishman
You can read Donald Sassoon's full Guardian obituary of Nina here and there is now an archive of Nina's writings.
Scabs and Abscesses
Bill Clinton is the last source I'd expect for the most useful political distinction I've heard in years, but he supplies exactly that in "The Clinton Tapes" by Taylor Branch (excellent review by David Runciman in 17 Dec issue of London Review of Books here). Clinton told Branch that his most successful and satisfying foreign policy initiative was the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, while his greatest disappointment was lack of progress over Israel/Palestine. He explained the difference thus:
" Peacemaking quests came in two kinds: scabs and abscesses. A scab is a sore with a protective crust, which may heal with time and simple care. In fact, if you bother it too much, you can reopen the wound and cause infection. An abscess, on the other hand, inevitably gets worse without painful but cleansing intervention. ‘The Middle East is an abscess,’ he concluded. ‘Northern Ireland is a scab.’ "
Appropriately grisly and medical as it is, I find this metaphor very powerful. It derives from the operation of self-healing systems in the human body, and I'm always attracted to comparisons between the individual body and the "body politic". Such parallels are always more than coincidence: both systems are complex and self-organising, and since the one (the human individual) is the "atom" from which the other is constructed, resemblances are not too surprising. The interesting question is, how does a practising politician tell a scab from an abscess? A modern doctor would send off samples for bacteriological tests, but a politician or a Victorian doctor would almost certainly have to rely on intuition. Clinton had good intuition about this, though very bad about certain other things.
Warm and Cold Lies
Lies and deceptions have always been potent political weapons, from the Trojan Horse all the way to the Zinoviev Letter. They are not the sole preserve of either Left or the Right, despite what adherents of those two wings would have you believ. We all know how Stalinism distorted the truth and rewrote history, the faces that disappeared from the photographs. However during the last decade lies have become a particular speciality of the Right, culminating in the deceptions used to launch the Iraq invasion, but most hilariously illustrated by the Bush neo-cons references to "making our own reality".
It's in this context that you should judge those recent leaked emails from climate scientists. It may be the case that believers in the reality of Global Warming have been "fine-tuning" the data to make their case look stronger. The sceptics' side prefer the newer, Bush/neocon style of lying, by just flat out denying the facts on the (observably effective) principle that any lie you tell three times becomes true. None of this matters a damn though, because lies only have any effect on human minds, not on nature. If the planet has decided to fry us all it will continue to do so whatever nonsense we spout about the matter...
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